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Ch. 8 part 2
After Mass they left the church and headed up the level drive running past the church door. A little farther up the hill a level side street opened out on the right, across from the church, and they went down this. It cut through the hillside, with tall narrow old houses on the left and on the right the rambling fieldstone church and school building of St. James, the new pale green metal roofing a pleasing contrast to the old masonry. The school door had a legend bearing on it “The Open Door.” “What’s this Open Door?” he said. “Much simpler than Open Sesame!” Brown laughed. Forest snorted. “It is a food kitchen where those in need of food like Peter Midwinter, or merely of desserts like Ronnie, may have a free meal without questions asked. I have seen veterans and homeless there, as well as young families both from the apartments of the Flat and the more prestigious dwellings on the hills. It is a good place.” “What is magic?” Forest said suddenly. “It was, but is no more.” answered the man in brown. “There was a time when the World had been but new-constructed by the hands of the Gods, and it remembered their hands and the touch of Elven-folk, and it was possible then to bend matter and command it, if one knew the right words or held the right tools. Yet this was not ‘magic’ as it is used in, say, Terry Goodkind or Garth Nix, or even in McKillip.” He frowned as if searching for words. “Craft might work better. In my speech we would say ‘chantra’, rather. But I’m referring more to the abilities of Men, or Dwarves, say, than to the venda. Elves, for example.” “Well, Elves can work magic.” “Elves use kuru to effect results on matter. Kuru is inside them, in their making, of their nature; the same way as speaking is for humans. Other creatures use otenda, that is ‘power’, to bring about results. Power is an ability to cause effects; your soul, for instance, has power to animate your body, power of reason, power of senses, and so on.” “So angels don’t work magic.” Brown chuckled. “Angels work miracles. They do things directly. Elves do things more indirectly—they often have to speak aloud or sing. But Men—Men need tools to bend matter. You see, Forest, what I told you about the stain of evil is possible only because, at its’ foundations, at the subphotonic level where laws of science seem to end, matter receives residue of spiritual action done to it. The living rock remembers the Noldor, and the grasses long grew green where they dwelled; but it also remembers the hands of the Gods that built it. In the deeps of time Men, if they knew how to speak the right language, could call to this spiritual residue, and it would answer. But this was dangerous even then.” They had come to a less steep street going back down to Main on the other side of St. James, and were now walking up Main. The sidewalks were entombed in deep brown bands of snow, with narrow snowblower canyons allowing passage. “There were other powers besides the Gods. There was He who seeks only destruction, greatest in his making, who walked in the world and hated what he saw. “There was Chaos. “He is feeble now, though for how much longer who can tell? For he sent his power into the very substance of Earth, infecting slowly all that is material, all that is matter, even air and gas and light itself were stained by the fumes of his breath. He cared not that this made him weaker, for what he sent out could never return: a curse put upon all spirits who walk into matter. He cared not that this made him unable to forsake a body as befits the spirit that he is; made him vulnerable to pain, to death. He had poisoned all Creation with the stain of corruption.” “Green things fell sick and rotted…” Forest murmered. “As a result,” said Brown, avoiding a patch of ice, “for Men to speak with matter risked the corruption of the residue of Chaos, and such craft, or chantra, was, well, perilous for mortals. Any kind of power is, to the weakness of Men.” They crossed the one-way Park Lane and traversed the single snowblowed path across the Green, then crossed the other half of Park Lane and headed to the right. NW Community College stood on the left, an imposing structure of yellow brick with round arches bordered with white stone, the same style as the Beardsley library. Wide-limbed low trees grew on the snowy lawn, and yews fronted it. On the Main St side was a courtyard of paving-bricks and a grand entrance with a vaulted canopy wide enough to drive under. The College library building lay beyond, where Main St as it left Winsted swung to the right to avoid Wallens Hill, leaving a narrowing naith between Main and the deep slow waters of the Still River, widened by it’s engulfment of Mad. The library occupied this naith, a long flat-roofed two-story building with a crazy round tower at the far end, which due to the projecting roof looked to be wearing a flat-brimmed hat. Brown took Forest across the courtyard toward the library. On the left a smaller detached building stood behind the main Founder’s Hall, connected to it by an arched bridge two floors high and covered. Landscaping trucks belonging to the maintenance staff were parked underneath. “So craft was possible then; but what was magic?” “The attempt to obtain power not inherent to yourself. Men, for instance, could by invoking spirits accomplish more than by simple craft; for that involved them using with their own words what residue of Gods and Elves remained in matter. But if they invoked Chaos by ritual of magic or by signs and sacrifice, the Chaos-residue responded, and often was enhanced by Chaos or his demons. Elves, too, could by studying arts deeper than theirs, and by use of devices of that art, obtain greater power; and so on it goes. But in any case, I am speaking of what was, not what is.” They went in through square glass doors and up a plain stair divided by a metal handrail. The walls were a dull cream. At the top was a foyer shaped like a broad pie slice, with a student lab on the left and the doors of the library proper directly in front. Inside the library had a square, spare, modern appearance, all straight lines and space. Bookshelves taller than Brown stood toward the middle. A wide space on the left had public computers and several tables with red-patterned chairs. Four armchairs were arranged around a circular coffee table. Wall-sized windows let in a flood of white winter sunlight. A colorful but aimless painting of random blotches of purple, blue and green with a dribble of red, hung between two windows. A big weird statue of a bear with rootlike feet and painted with leaves looked like some personification of Nature. On the right was the librarian space, like a closed-in corridor open at one point; on the wall past this were gorgeously-hued landscapes of somewhat swamp-exotic scenery. “It is good to see them making a fuss over something of actual merit and beauty.” said the Man in Brown. “Yet I fear it has more to do with the painters being black than with the glory of the paintings.” They went over to one of the tall windows and stood looking down upon the river just below. Grey trees swayed slightly, gleaming still with hoar. The river had long ago frozen right across, and snow buried it, so that it looked more like a sunken road than anything. “What happened to the magic?” said Forest. Brown gazed out the window, and despite his dark hair he seemed suddenly very old. “Time.” he answered. “As the ages wore on, and Elves began to leave Middle-earth, the land began to forget. And as it forgot, it grew harder and harder for men to make it hearken to the languages of old, and more and more tempting to turn to the things that ‘worked’. And as black magicians throve, true wizards began to dwindle, and old spells and words fell into oblivion or died with their speakers; of all that line, Merlin was the last, and he is gone. And even in his time, something else happened.” “What was that?” “There was a light that broke out in the south and east—south for Europe, east for us, or west if you went the other way. And where it shone, the Ancient Laws that govern the speech of stone and the response of mater, perished. As the Light spread, it banished the things of darkness. Men marched into the world bearing the Light in their hearts, driving before them the werewolves and the trolls, the ancient giants and fading Elves, venda great and small. Only a few refuges of Tavenda and of fay-folk across the whole of Middle-earth found how to make their power agreeable to the Light so that it did not drive them out; all others were sealed underground, destroyed or banished to night and the distant places. And when this Light came, a great earthquake tore through matter, and the residue of Chaos began to ooze out of matter—back into its’ owner.” “You mean Chaos is growing stronger??” “You might say that.” Brown said at last. His forehead wrinkled. “It is not easy to put into words you understand. Many things are happening at once, but a thread of thought can only follow one thing at a time, and the human mind is not good at seeing many things at once. But I was only explaining why the ancient magia—as it was called—is no longer possible, even for those who ignore the forbidding. Now that this Light is in the world, twilight does not exist. Chantra by humans is not only unlawful, but impossible. If you spoke to earth and stone, they would not answer. If you used the signs and spells that once made them respond, the only answer that would come is from the voices of the damned. Even to try is to risk calling up Hell. Hence what was lawful for Numenor and even for Merlin, is not lawful for Christians.” Forest was quiet for a while. Wind swayed the trees above the frozen river. At last he said, “Are fairies still around?” “Fairies?” Brown said. His eyes glinted with strange laughter. “Oh, you mean these guys?” and he folded his arms so his hands were on his shoulders and began flapping them like wings. “Where the bee sips I sip too, till my nose is flippin’ blue.” he sang in mocking falsetto. Forest gave him a solemn stare. Brown lowered his arms and grew serious. “There are some of the wood-venda that have wings and are small, but they are not fairies, and most definitely not elfs.” he said. “But here, in the New Lands…no. Not here. I told you that before.” He tied on his scarf. “Come, Forest. The sun has warmed the air a little, and we have a morning to use.” “I hope we aren’t going too far.” said Forest. “I didn’t eat breakfast.” “I brought some of the Merriweather brew.” said the man in brown. His voice echoed powerfully in the stair hallway. He paused in the vestibule to fish the battered thermos out of his backpack and unscrew the lid. A wonderful smell beat up from it. Somehow the aroma seemed to Forest to have all sorts of things in it…it reminded him of pine trees and cookies and wrapping paper and store-bought blueberry pie and Christmas turkey; it seemed, in fact, to remind him of Christmas. He drank the hot chocolate eagerly. “That should keep you going for a few miles.” Brown said in an amused voice. He opened the door. “You probably won’t feel very cold either. Merriweather makes good stuff.” He was right. Forest barely noticed the cold; he felt it pressing in from outside, but unable to penetrate. They headed down the courtyard and out to the crosswalk, waiting for the riverlike traffic to stop for a red. “How well do you know your trees, Forest?” said Brown above the swish of cars. “Dad told me some.” said Forest and tripped over his tongue. He shut his mouth hard. Brown took his hand and hurried him across; the awaited red light had finally come. “Your mother and your father are both to blame, and at the same time not wholly so. It was a master stroke, Forest.” They reached the other side and began to plod up the icy sidewalk. “Whose?” Forest managed at last to make himself say. “You know whose.” the man in brown said in a very quiet and ominous voice. They passed McDonald’s in red and yellow, and Dunkin’ Donuts in purple and orange, and crossed over the rivermeet. “He suspected you, Forest, as he suspected many others. He sent his thought upon your family, and now it is broken. If ever it was whole.” he added softly. “Do you see your sister at all, Forest?” “I don’t have a sister.” said Forest. The man in brown wheeled and stopped, staring at Forest fixedly. “Isn’t that interesting.” he muttered. “I think the Dragon must be quite afraid of your family, Forest. You are hidden from him, and that bothers him greatly. But your father never told you enough. So it is left in the end to me, a secret voice that gainsayeth, and a light where darkness was decreed.” At Forest’s startled expression the man in brown burst out laughing. “No, his name is not mine.” he said. “But it is true of me none the less.” “Do you have a name?” said Forest. “I do,” replied the man in brown. “And that name in itself has a meaning, but not an explanation. I will speak it in one place and no other. But the snows of this Fell Winter are delaying—delaying—delaying!” He smote his fist in anger. “And I can do nothing about it. Even their Lords are puzzled by it. The earth grows cold at the nearness of the Rider. But no matter. We must make do with what we are dealt.” They crossed over the hill and descended into the bowl of Super Stop & Shop, with its’ green and red signs, and embarked upon the long flat mile beyond. “Here a river once flowed, where now a brook seeps.” said Brown. “What river?” “The Daslenga.” Brown said quietly. Forest stiffened. “Mad, as it is known here, one of many Mad Rivers across New England alone. You saw the river-meet, did you not?” “But there’s a hill in the way.” “Aha! Good for you! Yes, there is a hill. Regional High sits upon it’s crown. When the Grinding Ice came over this land, it scooped out the Still River Valley so it cut Mad River in half, and made it lower than the former bed, and when it left it dropped the great dome of sand above Super Stupor, shutting off the Mad forever.” They reached the humerously titled W. West Hill Rd, coming down on the right at an incredibly steep angle from West Hill, and turned up it. Their pace grew slower as the slope stiffened. “Ah, here is one!” said Brown in delight. He pointed to a tall straight tree with ridged close bark forming neat vertical grooves up its’ bole. The pattern of twigs against the deep blueness was angular and uncluttered, the twigs few and at right angles. “Do you know this?” “Ash.” said Forest. “And well named,” said the man in brown, “for it burns clean and hot, though a little slow. But its’ true name is ars, or ruined white; for ash is fluffy white and grey, and the wood of the ash tree is creamy white as well.” They climbed on and came to a smooth-skinned tree with very pale, blueish-grey bark and many kinked but flowing limbs and zigzag twigs with sharp spear-like brown buds. “And what is she?” “That’s beech.” said Forest. “Her name is orvert, the copper-green, for the brilliancy of her greenness and the deep gold of her autumn. And what is this one?” The tree he had indicated was graceful but bent of structure, thin little branches springing abruptly from horizontally banded yellowish bark that peeled like cellophane. A thicket of grey-black trees with whiteish long spots and faint horizontal stripes, whose twigs were purplish and bore a net of buds, grew nearby. Several saplings of white peeling thin bark, with black and purplish-red twigs, grew among them. “I…think they’re all birch.” “Good.” smiled Brown. “Many soldiers make up his house, and his kin number the yellow birch,, the black birch, the grey and silver birches; but the white birch is their lord and here in the North he is most numerous. And the name of his house is Ordrace.” He indicated an odd tree with bark like a mulberry and twigs that were thick and wide apart and glowed a pale blue-purple like blackberry canes. “This is elder; not the sullen alder who haunts the fens and low places, but his foe and watchman the box elder, of the house of the maples. Alwambo is the alder named, and Clumfrutho for his clustered cones; but Ongorond is the box elder’s true name, and to it does he answer.” “But you said we can no longer speak the language of the trees and command them to answer.” “Nor can we.” said Brown. “But when the Road returns we may call them in the end, and to the one of the forests is it given to so do, that they may fulfill the reason they were planted and withstand the Rider of the Darkness.” They mounted up now beside a Christmas tree farm on the left, on the slope of the hill. On the high bank above the road was a buried stone wall, and old trees in a belt of wood grew out of it. Pointing to one of these ancient trees, Brown arched an eyebrow at Forest. The trees were ponderous and knotted, with great rugged limbs and pale brown bark in small scales, or long tattered plates, or thick rough ridges. Their twigs were dark gray and kinked, close together like a net. “Maple.” said Forest. “These are the roadsmen of New England.” said the man in brown. “Very ancient are they, but great in strength, protectors of the roads and paths. Even the vanished roads cast off by Men do they still guard. Malvorn are they, and their smaller kinsmen the red maples are gromlë, and these keep watch upon the swamps and deep fens. But not all fens can they enter.” He motioned to the triangular spires of the pruned pines on the left, deep green and dark green and blue-green. “These are foes.” he said. “Beware the pines. White pine is noble and lofty, but stern and perilous: artarn the Guardian of the North. He watches eternally lest the Rider return into the norths he once inhabited. Austrian of the long stabbing needles is mischevious and weak of wood, but his cones are like thunderbolts: Dintarn the untrusty. Pitch pine crouches on hills that were burned and the edges of cliffs, and his cones are armed and hate the plucking; he keeps watch and sends tidings, but he is treacherous and aids both sides: Gitcharn the chatterer. Beware most of all the spruces, Norway the graceful, Vardape friend of witches: Blue the somber who lurks in the far north, Plovard unfriendly to Men: Black the angry who guards the northern fens and hates passage, Daurcavard who loves to drive the unwary into bogs.” “Hemlock isn’t a pine.” said Forest. They reached a roadmeet near the top of the hill, where the intersecting road that connected West Hill Road with the old North Road (named quite stupidly E. West Hill Rd) branched off. Brown turned up this. “No, she is half and half.” he said. “She is graceful and delight in rocky places and hills, and she serves White Pine and seeks to infest everything, that the Rider may find every foot contested. Yet is she grown wild and dangerous, and sometimes she delights in malice; and the hemlock swamps are not canny places to wander. Tarjë is she names, and Vernolda, and is more trusty than the others. Yet Hemlock is not her ancient name among men.” Woods closed around them, with infrequent houses. “Here,” said the man in brown sadly, pausing at a cluster of smooth dark shoots with a ragged brown leaf or two still clinging, and the biggest shoot bulged with cracks, and a sort of orange rust grew in them. “You wouldn’t know him, I think. Not many do. Him does the Rider hate above all others.” “Chestnut!” exclaimed Forest. “Your father did pass on something worth knowing, then!” said Brown. “Yes, this is Chestnut. A blight keeps vicious watch upon him, lest any of his stems should grow as they once did. No tree here lived so long or grew so huge. Castanë is he named, and the virtue in him is of opposition to evil. Witches shunned his spreading limbs. But for his roots they have only contempt.” They headed on. Brown paused beside a sweeping vase-shaped tree with yellow-tan-white bark of soft ridges that formed rough jagged diamonds, and each ridge was layered with hard and soft bands. “Her also the Rider hates, for she fights the decay that he generates. Disease he sent to destroy her, and few elms remain now. Ulma in the Latin, her true name is Almba.” He pointed to a smooth tree with close-adhering narrow plates forming interlocking grooves up its’ trunk. The branches were grey and entirely smooth with thick branching twigs and huge buds. “What is he?” “That’s hickory, isn’t it?” “One of many. Very tough are they, and they climb up barren mountains, and their virtue is of endurance. Their name is orndirk. Next to it, see you this dying tree with the thin soft peeling red bark and prickly twigs coated with scales? He is cedar, whose berries are healing, and he is astray with his slow growing and sweet wood; he does not belong outside of the mountains where none can overtop him. Sëdal he is named, or Sëdalgrû for the redness of his heartwood, and he is last to die on bitter ground or drought, and potent indeed is the poison that kills him; but shade is death to him.” “My father would never have been able to teach me, anyway.” said Forest. “He doesn’t speak your language.” Brown smiled. “He speaks his own language, Forest, and is wise in his own way. He is the voice of knowledge.” They walked in silence for some ways. Houses interrupted the trees, some with homeowners desperately shovelling three feet of snow off their roofs. “Will I ever see him again?” said Forest. Brown nodded. “His fate is tangled with the Road even as is yours. Yes, I believe you will meet him soon…but that lies with you as well as him.” He stopped all at once next to a short branching tree with an incredibly lumpy bole. It looked elmlike, but the bark ridges were very thin and narrow. Great lumps marked the flowing trunk where the wood had flowed over dead stumps. “Ah! Here we are. Do you know this?” “It—looks like an elm.” “Brother of Almba, but he is not Elm. This is hornbeam, whose boughs are tough as hickory and have a virtue of finding. But his true name is Warntem.” He pointed to a slender, sweeping tree with soft cracked bark. “She is linden, gentle sister of the sycamore, and beloved of Elves. She brings light into deep forests. Nindello is her name, and her mighty brother is Hyarcornda the Defier, for he is tough against smoke and soot, and holds the swamps beside gromlë. By his spotted and pale bark do you know him.” Then he indicated a powerful-looking tree that rose in swift sweep of trunk to huge spreading limbs. “Here is the king and lord of the trees. None are mightier than he. You know him as Oak, and the oaks of his house, the white, black and red, the chestnut oak, the pin oak, are all reckoned as one. But his name is kerk, and also jarka the Gateholder, for some oaks stood between and upon the thresholds of worlds.” They walked on for a while. Brown pointed to a straight tree like a column with thrusting armlike boughs and vertical fissures in the bark. “Tulip poplar.” he said. “His virtue is his steadiness, and alone of forest trees he bears large flowers, green and orange tulips upon his crown, and these have a strength and hardihood. Pondoupo is his name, pillar of the forest.” They came to the old North Road and turned left downhill. On the left were houses; on the right lay a narrow hemlock swamp. They paused. Deep lay the snow, and thick and green swept the hemlock boughs above it; yet a queerness seemed to linger, to emanate from deep within: as if it was the home of strange uncanny beings. “This is Featherlock Swamp, where alone on the earth the old name is preserved, though men have forgotten it and it appears on no map. For the true name of hemlock is Featherlock Pine.” They walked on down the road for a couple more miles, descending several hills. The slopes were green with pine and laurel. The sun passed the noon and the shadows grew long, and the cold drew on again. Reaching Rt. 44 they turned left and began to walk westward toward Winsted. On the left splashed an icebound brook: the old bed of Mad River, coming out of the round swamps under West Hill below them. “What exactly is this Chaos residue?” Forest questioned. “It is his essence.” the man in brown replied. “All matter has a tendency to break down, decay, lose form; this is the Chaos seed and it is of him, and was spread slowly by him throughout the world. Where the Gods dwelt and in Eden in the east alone was this stain excluded; but Valinor is removed from the world and Eden concealed behind the North Wind, and even the heavens are corrupted now.” “The Sun was made by the Gods, from the last fruit of the Golden Tree—wasn’t it?” said Forest. “But the Sun right over there—that sun—is a huge ball of flaming gas. Which one is real?” “Both of them, Forest.” said Brown sadly. “The Sun was once far other than she is, and Urwendi has fallen, Arien so fair has fallen from grace and pilots Anar no more. And the Ship of the Moon has become a ball of stone, and the Stars flee outwards. This was the great disaster, Forest.” They passed Eaglewood Farm and drew near to the Peebles plaza before Forest again spoke. “I don’t understand.” “It is difficult.” agreed Brown. “But in this iron cold and high snow I may not show you much at night before your heart freezes, and that tale cannot be told at once, nor even by little. You have learned enough for one day, I think.” Forest looked up. Engrossed in his thoughts, he had not noticed where they were, but now before him there stood McDonald’s, outside the Community College, more than a mile from where they had just been. “Com, let’s have something to eat.” said the man in brown. He bought Forest a couple of huge sandwiches and another for himself, and when the wonderful food was consumed he added a soft-serve ice cream and a hot cherry pie. They stepped out of the door and walked down Main, negotiating the narrow canyons delved past the Dairy Queen corner and heading down Old Rt. 8, the Still River Turnpike heading south. They paused at the Mad River bridge and Forest gazed at the water tumbling over golden rocks and edged with white ice. The water was incredibly clear: it was like gazing into liquid glass. They walked on down past the sports complex and the frozen park, buried under white ice like a glacier, field and playscape alike. On the left was a row of incredibly huge silver maples, two centuries at least, graceful but sprawling arms overhanging road and playground. On the right, across the road, a row of blue spruce fenced the tennis courts and soccer/baseball fields with the big bleachers. A low brick wall barred the playground from Rt. 8. Willow St joined on the right where the field ended, and opposite it was a pillared opening in the wall. Across the intersection on the rise was the deserted skateboard park behind its’ tall fence. South of them was a gap: the high ground the skating park was on, and opposite it the hill the cemetery was on, a cement wall like a cliff. “Those are the Gates of Winsted.” said Brown. “The old railroad crossed there, but its’ bridge is long fallen.” They went into the opening in the wall. A forked drive serviced both cemetery and playscape, going uphill on the right and level on the left, circling past the park and on around the base of the hill. Forest said nothing as they took the left fork. The cemetery lay sprawled over a fingered hill reaching out like a broad hand from the feet of Case Mt, winding drives curving across it under tall jutting spruce and white pine, and other pines as well, rising up here and there in an irregular sort of order. The gravestones were all short and thick and looked recent. “This is Sand Bank Burying Ground.” said the man in brown. “After the Great Flood, this valley was a long deep lake; the fens of Still River are all that remains, after it ate a channel through the stony hills to the north. Into the lake Mad River emptied, and here it spilled its’ sands.” “Where did it flow?” said Forest, looking up at the hill, then back at the broad flats and the steeple of St. Joseph’s. “Wouldn’t it have emptied in back over there?” “Those flats were all filled once with level sand, and at its’ farthest the river emptied here.” said Brown. “Then it began to cut lower, as the waters tore open a fault in the stony hills; and as it did it snaked back and forth, removing the sand, leaving the level plans and the old delta high above it. But now the lake is gone, and graves grow upon the sandy hill. These graves are not here by chance. Come a little farther.” They walked on along the level drive circling the hill on the north. It was shadeless, and Forest could see into the lumpy swamps on the left. As they rounded the hill he made out a high level causeway running out from under the far side of the hill and crossing the valley. “The old railroad grade.” said Brown. “The bridge over Still is gone, of course. It goes above the ruins of the Pickett outbuildings and so to the Gates of Winsted, then behind the skating park and the old buildings above Willow St, to the paved path below Prospect, and then through the Westwoods lumber factory and on up Mad River.” They rounded the fingers of the flat-topped hill that ran down like short fat ridges from the top. An ancient maple stood at the edge of the hill. The tall pole-like pines with their ragged short branches…the sparse way they stood…dark against the white sky…there should be fewer… “I know this place.” whispered Forest. “But I’ve never seen it….it reminds men…I should know it…” Then he remembered. Another graveyard leaped into his mind, like and not like this one; though it rolled, it was not on a hill, but on a lap between dim vague peaks, and the stones were far thinner and more ancient, and the pines fewer and sparser, red pines with scanty clustered branches near the top and white pines with short ragged limbs, barely twenty or so. And on a ledge upon the right, coming out of the craggy hills buried in snow, was a white and unplowed road. The two graveyards were dissimilar, and yet an eerie likeness was between them, as if they shared somehow a mysterious linking. “I forgot my dream.” said Forest. The man in brown nodded. “Yes, Forest, you see rightly. That is why these graves were put here, and not somewhere else. But do you know the name of the graves of your dream?” Forest shook his head in frustration. “I know it, but I can’t remember.” “They are the Graves of Arheled.” said the Man in Brown. Forest looked at him, cold prickles running up him. “No, I will not tell you who he is.” Brown said before Forest could say anything. “And only because we are here do I even speak his name: the dragons have many ears. Not even here will I tell you more.” They walked back to the entrance. To the left Old Rt 8 curved under the high cement wall between the Gates of Winsted, guarded by the cemetery. “The railroad was one intrusion I supported.” said Brown. “The long wall of its’ high bed forms a rampart across the gap in the leaguer of the Nine Hills, defending against the south, even as the crescent of the Five Churches forms a string of forts to hold the North.” They walked up Willow St, which parallels Main, the river lying between. The narrow and perilous intersection with Bridge Street they passed and headed up Prospect, which traverses the side of the Winsted Valley about 40 feet above the river. From this they could look out over Winsted (hence the name Prospect), a cheery sight amid the snow; for though the old tall houses stood thick upon the left, on the right was a cement wall dropping abruptly to the paved rail grade and the river, and the trees growing by the river were bare. It curved to the north following the horseshoe valley, and neared Lake Street. A quaint garage with dozens of old cars was jammed in a triangle of land between Prospect and the river, and a tall old tenement stood above Lake St: in the summer the old man Bill sold used bikes here. Prospect abruptly plunged downhill to cross Lake, opposite a long level street running straight as a sword toward the distant hills. Brown pointed out the round lump of Camp Hill with its’ tower rising from the houses, off on the right. A higher but more abrupt hill rose behind and to the left, north of Winsted, white under its’ pines. “If that hilltop were cleared,” said Brown, “it would look like an immense cobblestone sunk in the earth. There’s the hospital right underneath it. That’s Cobble Hill. You see that rounded hump left of it? Part of the same hill, another round granite loaf named Second Cobble.” “Where do you live?” said Forest. The man in brown considered him for a time. “Yes, you should be told, I think.” he said. “Do you see that street in front of us?” Forest followed the line of his finger. Meadow Street ran on north, straight as a sword, left of Second Cobble, like a broad brown arrow toward a deep valley between Second Cobble and a more distant hill covered with pines. “My house is between those two hills.” he said. Forest looked up at him, startled. The man in brown, instead of saying anything more, started walking up Lake St. “But what is it like?” The man in brown looked straight ahead for some time. “Hidden.” he said at last. “I tell you as much as I do because you are most important of the six.” “Who are the other five?” “You will not meet each other in full until you meet on Temple Fell.” said Brown. “Ah, here we are at your house. And there’s your mom just pulling in! Be a gentleman and open the gate for her, will you?” Forest, who had been staring at the asphalt under his feet as he plodded along, looked up with a creased brow: they were on Lake St, weren’t they? But what met his eyes was the high mounded snowpiles the plow had made on each side of the island drive, and one had the snow tunnel he’d delved into it with a spade. The man in brown was no longer beside him, and the crunching of snow under tires told him that sure enough his mom was pulling in. Forest hurried over to the closed gate and pushed it open. His mom waved as she pulled in. I guess one shouldn’t be surprised at strange things happening when you walk with the Man in Brown, Forest thought.